This was very hard to find here in Finland. I guess there isn’t much in the way of audience for a movie like this here.

Anyhow, spoilers.

Here’s a major one you should learn or maybe not, depending on whether you want to get spoiled on movies: The bad guy has an Android phone and it’s brought up on two occasions at the very beginning of the movie. I’m sure this is on purpose. Apple is quite lenient on who can use their devices on film and you don’t even need to ask permission on most occasions, but they don’t allow the villains to do it. So, basically the villain is broadcasting right when we meet him that he is behind the murders.

It’s just that not everyone is going to get it, but since the movie reminds you of this, which is kind of weird. It gives you a very different perspective on what’s going on in the film, as that character, called Clifton, but I was contemplating never naming him, because no-one remembers his name in the movie, does push the group into certain directions from the start. So, there’s going to be two very different experiences whether you pick up on that or not.

There’s a book called Suomen historia (The History of Finland) which is a hundred anecdotes from throughout our hundred year (at the time the book was published) independence. One of the stories is about one family’s different kind of approach to the 1952 Olympics, which were held in Helsinki. They decided to visit the city just to see some black people. There was nothing malevolent about it and the parents asked the children not to point and to be respectful. They just had never seen a black person before and thought the trip would be worth it.

I bring this up, because I’m white as fuck and from a country that was very white in my childhood and, even compared to countries like the US, still is. I did know a few black boys roughly my age, but that was more than most people.

So, while we can differentiate between the people who got the Android thing and those who didn’t, we can probably similarly differentiate between the people who understand the black experience and those who don’t. I’m definitely in the latter camp, so I can’t really say I get the movie in the same way the target audience does. Of course, there are universal experiences here, but at the same time there are points in the movie where I feel I’m out of my depth.

Yeah, I’m commpletely the wrong person to review this. Still, here we are with the confidence of a white educated middle-aged upper middle-class male, so I’m doing it anyway.

The movie is specifically about blackness. We follow a group of friends who have convened to celebrate Juneteenth for the first time together in ten years. They are forced to play a game which asks them questions regarding blackness, the first one being something like “Name a black character who survived a horror movie” (Chris in Get Out immediately came to mind, actually, but the point was made.) At one point they must choose the blackest among them. So, they go through all of them analyzing the blackness of each of them. They name Clifton, because he is the outsider who has the least connection to anyone around him and this was part of his plan.

The story explanation for this discussion of blackness is that Clifton was already an outsider when they were all in college decade ago. However, he was invited to a Juneteenth and during a game his blackness was questioned (by calling his behavior “white”), he took it to heart, left the party and didn’t focus enough on the driving, so he killed a woman by hitting her with his car. This whole thing is him getting back to the others for what happened.

However, because Clifton wasn’t really one of the gang, he didn’t realize the hazing happened to everyone. He just didn’t understand how all of it works. Sure, there should be consent for such teasing, but if everyone else is within that social contract, it can be difficult to notice that someone is just not, especially as the teasing is not actually about the person, but it’s more like making fun of the cringy white people.

There is also an interesting scene with a white park ranger, whose name is actually B. White. The black folk are being hunted at that point and they don’t want to trust a white guy who in their mind is basically a cop. So, in order to convince them, he tells them that if he were to be invited to a cookout, he would be honored, but would not go. He is then questioned about this and he expands on this by saying that he would not want to invade an all-black space as black people should have a right to have those. The killers get him soon after.

(If you haven’t heard of the concept of a cookout, being invited to one is an important symbolic gesture of being accepted as an ally by the black community. Food and related events in general are an important way minorities maintain their culture and social norms.)

In general, the movie is fun, but I did not find it funny. However, I do think this might just be my whiteness talking. Also, comedy doesn’t necessarily translate very well from culture to culture anyhow even if cultures have homogenized globally due to mass media. There are things in the movie I identify as jokes, but I don’t really get them or know how they started.

The concept is interesting and horror movies are a fertile soil for this kind of an approach. The tagline is “We can’t all die first” and it’s displayed very prominently on the poster taking the top half of it. The movie does feel kind of slow at points, but not badly enough to really take away from the movie.